Marc Benioff says Salesforce is basically starting from a ‘beginner’s mind’ mentality and going all in on AI agents
Mark Benioff said Salesforce was pivoting hard to AI agents.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has a plan to get ahead in the age of artificial intelligence: AI agents.
In a recent interview with Fortune magazine, Benioff discussed Salesforce’s “hard pivot” to Agentforce, which lets users build custom AI agents that can interact directly with customers. The AI agents are meant to be more advanced than AI chatbots and can be used with other Salesforce products, including its customer-relationship-management software and apps.
When Benioff cofounded Salesforce in 1999, it was a major disruptor in the business-software industry. “This is the next big transformation,” he told Fortune.
Benioff said he believes agents are the next big thing in AI. “We have to pivot the whole company to agents,” he told the outlet.
He referred to the 1997 book “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail” and the “beginner’s mind,” saying, “You have to start at the beginning and think it all the way through.”
The billionaire said he realized about a decade ago how much AI would change everything.
“I was like, ‘Oh, fuck, AI is going to take over the world,'” Benioff told the magazine. “I need to hit the accelerator pedal — and Salesforce was about 10 times smaller.”
Salesforce has rolled out Agentforce to some of its clients for testing. During the company’s second-quarter earnings call last week, Benioff said it had so far been well received.
“We’re still going to have humans in our companies, but we’re also going to have these agents,” Benioff said. “These agents don’t require a conversational prompt to take action. You can do advanced planning, reasoning with minimal human input.”
Agentforce is set to launch in October. Benioff said it would also be on display at Salesforce’s conference, Dreamforce, in San Francisco starting on September 17.
“It’s not going to say, ‘Welcome to Dreamforce’ — it’s going to be ‘Welcome to Agentforce,'” Benioff told Fortune.
